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beaverdownunder writes "Melbourne restauranteur Paul Mathis has developed a one-character replacement for the word 'The' – effectively an upper-case 'T' and a lower-case 'h' bunched together so they share the upright stem – and an app that puts it in everyone's hand by allowing users to download an entirely new keyboard complete not just with his 'Th' symbol, but also a row of keys containing the 10 or 15 (depending on the version) most frequently typed words in English. Mathis has already copped criticism from people who claim he is attempting to trademark a symbol that is part of the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet (pronounced 'tshe,' the letter represents the 'ch' sound found in the word 'chew')."

You abused it anyway. Thorn is not for the sound in 'that' (which is the same as the sound in 'this'), but for the one in 'with'. Just think about whether someone with a heavy accent would replace th by d or by f. ('dis' and 'dat' require an ed, 'wif' requires a forn).

[The thorn letter] has the sound of either a voiceless dental fricative, like th as in the English word thick, or a voiced dental fricative, like th as in the English word the. Modern Icelandic usage generally excludes the latter, which is instead represented with the letter eth; [...]

Like all modern trivia, it was learned on an arbitrarily hyper-specific wiki entry.

A thorn can be either a voiced or voiceless dental fricative, even if modern Icelandic orthography only uses it for the former.

Thorn was the original initial spelling for the English word now spelled "the". The "ye Olde Time Shoppe" signs are a reflection of the period when English typesetters were using "y" to represent thorn because they were using Continental fonts from countries like Germany, where the "th" is completely foreign.

I want to add punctuation for common conversational occurrences and sentiments that happen in real life without a written counterpart. Most could be drafted from programming symbols and could be used formally where emoticons are inappropriate. It be a paridigm change in literature, like 3D IMAX w/ DOLBY v.(?) is for cinema. Imagine being able to read the following and more into your usual intake. St-s-st-stuttering, for example already has sufficient representation, but, what about:1. belching2.farting3.acc

Or he could just use y, which is what Ye Oldfashioned Sign was all about. (Though I suspect it was used in typography rather than signs, because it would be easy enough to paint an eth or thorn even if a typesetter didn't have them.)

As Gutenberg was German, the first printing presses only had letters as required for German. Discarding the umlauts from the printing presses imported from Germany was easy, but creating new letter types for eth and thorn was tricky. An initial workaround for eth was to use y because in certain handwritings the two looked similar. Later they used th for both eth and thorn.

That's not an 'f'. It's a "long s" used in the beginning or middle of a word.see here [newtestamentchurch.org] note the crossbar on the long s is only on the left side, and they use "s" at the end of a word. The regular "s" was only used in the middle of a word if it came directly after a long s

I think a better goal would be to start adding to the language, to replace phonetic combinations such as Sh, Th (which existed before), and to start using more phonetically consistent letters, like "K" for the hard C sound, and C for the soft (no nore CK required). This also frees up S to be used as the SH phonem. English spelling really is ridiculous, and could use a good refactoring.

English spelling leans diachronic, meaning that a 'c' represents an underlying 'c' in the language from which a word was borrowed. For example, 'c' is pronounced differently in "focus" and "foci", but the use of the same letter allows readers to associate the plural with the same word's singular.

Besides, you don't need to free up 's' when there's a perfectly good symbol for the sound in the middle of "fishin'" and "fission": the integral sign [wikipedia.org].

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all

He should really campaign for touch typing literacy first. Someone having to switch back and forth between looking at their screen and their keyboard will slow them down far more than a few extra keystrokes.

Icelandic still has them. If they were really important we'd return to using them. They're not and we don't. I'm all for them (and eth, Ð/ð) but there's no need. There's a much better case to be made for a glyph to represent and/or [typophile.com] but even the one offered doesn't flow; it's hard to distinguish from the ampersand and not easily written without multiple strokes which themselves lead to more confusion than clarification.

Thirty years ago when I still thought 'hope and change' was an actual thing, I was excited to discover the Unifon alphabet. It accomplishes the goals of this guy and much more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unifon

BECAUSE WE ARE STILL BEARING SOME OF THE SCARS OF OUR BRIEF SKIRMISH with II-B English, it is natural that we should be enchanted by Mr. George Bernard Shaw's current campaign for a simplified alphabet.

Obviously, as Mr. Shaw points out, English spelling is in much need of a general overhauling and streamlining. However, our own resistance to any changes requiring a large expenditure of mental effort in the near future would cause us to view with some apprehension the possibility of some day receiving a morning paper printed in-to us-Greek.

Our own plan would achieve the same end as the legislation proposed by Mr. Shaw, but in a less shocking manner, as it consists merely of an acceleration of the normal processes by which the language is continually modernized.

As a catalytic agent, we would suggest that a National Easy Language Week be proclaimed, which the President would inaugurate, outlining some short cut to concentrate on during the week, and to be adopted during the ensuing year. All school children would be given a holiday, the lost time being the equivalent of that gained by the spelling short cut.

In 1946, for example, we would urge the elimination of the soft c, for which we would substitute "s." Sertainly, such an improvement would be selebrated in all sivic-minded sircles as being suffisiently worth the trouble, and students in all sities in the land would be reseptive to- ward any change eliminating the nesessity of learning the differense be- tween the two letters.

In 1947, sinse only the hard "c" would be left, it would be possible to substitute "k" for it, both letters being pronounsed identikally. Imagine how greatly only two years of this prosess would klarify the konfusion in the minds of students. Already we would have eliminated an entire letter from the alphabet. Typewriters and linotypes, kould all be built with one less letter, and a11 the manpower and materials previously devoted to making "c's" kould be turned toward raising the national standard of living.

In the fase of so many notable improvements, it is easy to foresee that by 1948, "National Easy Language Week" would be a pronounsed sukses. All skhool tshildren would be looking forward with konsiderable exsitement to the holiday, and in a blaze of national publisity it would be announsed that the double konsonant "ph" no longer existed, and that the sound would henseforth be written "f" in all words, This would make sutsh words as "fonograf" twenty persent shorter in print.

By 1949, public interest in a fonetik alfabet kan be expekted to have inkreased to the point where a more radikal step forward kan be taken without fear of undue kritisism. We would therefore urge the elimination, at that time of al unesesary double leters, whitsh, although quite harmles, have always ben a nuisanse in the language and a desided deterent to akurate speling. Try it yourself in the next leter you write, and se if both writing and reading are not fasilitated.

With so mutsh progres already made, it might be posible in 1950 to delve further into the posibilities of fonetik speling. After due konsidera- tion of the reseption aforded the previous steps, it should be expedient by this time to spel al difthongs fonetikaly. Most students do not realize that the long "i" and "y," as in "time" and "by," are aktualy the difthong "ai," as it is writen in "aisle" and that the long "a" in "fate," is in reality the difthong "ei" as in "rein." Although perhaps not imediately aparent, the saving in taime and efort wil be tremendous when we leiter elimineite the sailent "e," as meide posible bai this last tsheinge.

For, as is wel known, the horible mes of "e's' apearing in our writen language is kaused prinsipaly bai the present nes

Of course this assumes every body speaks English, too. Depending on who you listen to, we should be downloading either Spanish keyboards if in the Americas or Mandrian keyboards for everywhere else. Or maybe just leave the keyboard alone. It might be antiquated, but really, the convenience of a "Th" key over all of the muscle memory and fine motor skills involved with the QWERTY keyboard for billions of people? The Dvorak keyboard was supposed to be a better design, too, but it never caught on, eithe.

You will be using a tablet with its crippled input capabilities. Because we expect you to consume content, not produce it. On the rare occasions that we want to hear from you, you can tweet us from your cell phone. 140 characters at a time is all we want from you anyway.

Also, we need keys for 'sh', 'ch', 'gh', 'ing', 'ion', 'tion', 'etc', etc. This could become unwieldly, so we should probably just adopt a system of characters that covers all of the possible phonetic variations. To save time, we could have multiple characters for the same sound, which would imply certain meanings based on context.

We'd probably end up with thousands of different characters; hopefully the people who make most of our components would be able to adapt.

For most people, it's not the layout of the keyboard that's slowing them down, but rather the lack of effort in trying to learn proper typing techniques. You could probably put the keyboard in the worst possible configuration ever, with all Q,Z, V, and X all in the home row, and people could still learn to type sufficiently fast on it.

I'd say that it is because most people could not care less and QWERTY is status quo. QWERTY will have to cause cancer before anyone cares enough to change it. That or someone with a burning desire to push Dvorak gets their hands on a lot of power.

On the bright side, no one is going to start using this change either. As other posters have pointed out, we used to have the Thorn character, and there's a reason we don't anymore.

(It is interesting that Snopes doesn't actually debunk this myth. Instead, they explain why it's the reasonable outcome in a situation where there were weak reasons behind that width and no strong reasons to replace it with anything very different. So, while they explain why a lot of details you hear in the myth are dubious, the overall story is basically correct. QWE

Because there isn't definitive proof dvorak is faster even for physical keyboards (studies differ on if there's any gain), much less for 1-2 finger tap keyboards like on a phone. Because the world is used to qwerty and the costs of retraining in dvorak dwarf the lifetime gain of dvorak, if there actually is any. Because the fastest method of input on phones so far is to actually not type at all, but use a Swype-like mechanism and/or heavy prediction, which actually work worse with a dvorak keyboard.

I don't really think this is a huge gain either, but the Dvorak as second coming thing annoys the hell out of me.

Don't get me wrong, I used Grafitti back in the 2000s. It worked well compared to on screen keyboards of the time, due to bad resistive touchscreens. But you can't possibly think that for western languages that drawing each character by stylus is faster than tapping a button. You'd be hard pressed to do 10 wpm on one.

Now eastern languages like Chinese that don't work well on a keyboard- there a handwriting system makes more sense.

I got a job offer last week and as part of my salary negotiations I demanded Dvorak keyboards. I still haven't heard back

Is this some sort of in-joke? software remaps for Dvorak are everywhere. If you need the keys themselves printed with the Dvorak characterset, then you haven't learned to touch-type in the first place.

I'd submit that the biggest change that mobile keyboards need is to move letters that are similarly replaceable in words further apart.

For instance:bitbutbot

The three vowels are packed together. Regardless of your input method, you'll probably have to place your finger over more than one of those letters. It doesn't help to have autocorrect either, since it's just as likely to provide a valid but incorrect choice--unless the system has contextual correction. Ideally, the vowels should be as far spread apart as possible. Other similarly replaceable letters should also be moved apart. Letters that rarely replace one another (a and z, say) should be close together. I've got pretty slender fingers and I still mistype all over the place. The iPhone's autocorrect is quite good, and appears to me to autocorrect based on what side of the letter you typed (that is, it seems to be able to tell the difference between you typing on the left side of i or the right, allowing it to occasionally correctly guess between 'but' and 'bot', even if you put your finger mostly on the i) but even still, it's too easy to confuse the letters.

Qwerty was designed to be optimal for mechanical typewriters. The claim that it was designed to slow typing down to prevent jams is only half-true - it's actually designed so that the most commonly used letter combinations were kept apart but still typed with one hand, to minimise the possibility of two keys at once being pressed and jamming the mechanism. The non-grid, staggered rows feature is another mechanical relic, to allow the link bars from the lower rows to pass between the bars for those above.

Qwerty was designed to be optimal for mechanical typewriters. The claim that it was designed to slow typing down to prevent jams is only half-true - it's actually designed so that the most commonly used letter combinations were kept apart but still typed with one hand, to minimise the possibility of two keys at once being pressed and jamming the mechanism.

Except that the most common word in English ("the") alternates hands. This gives us the common "teh" mistyping, as our hands hit the 2nd and 3rd letters simultaneously, and the mechanism misinterprets the result.

(Oops; this is getting dangerously close to being back on topic. Please forgive me.;-)

It's probably easy to learn, but if you want to maximize input speed, this guy sort of has the right idea, that consolidating common inputs into single units is the way to go to speed up entry. However stenographers have already come up with much more complete stenotype [wikipedia.org] systems, used mainly by court reporters. The downside is that it's a bit esoteric to learn, moreso than Dvorak.

but the basic layout is the same, so if you are an Englishman going to work in Germany, it won't be too hard to adapt.

That's not entirely true. The keyboard I use right now is a danish keyboard, with 3 extra letter keys that are local to danish. The problem is that the designers, back in the dark ages of computing, thought it wise to completely jumble the control combinations aswell (the onse to reach special characters, like slashes). This probably seemed quite smart at the time, but as a programmer I have to hit some weird combinations to achieve the same things my en-us counterparts can reach with a single key. The [ ch

In the first phase of the experiment, 10 government typists were retrained on the Dvorak keyboard. It took well over 25 days of four-hour-a-day training for these typists to catch up to their old QWERTY speeds. (Compare this to the Navy study's results.) When the typists had finally caught up to their old speeds, the second phase of the experiment began. The newly trained Dvorak typists continued training and a group of 10 QWERTY typists (matched in skill to the Dvorak typists) began a parallel program to improve their skills. In this second phase the Dvorak typists progressed less quickly with further Dvorak training than did QWERTY typists training on QWERTY keyboards. Thus Strong concluded that Dvorak training would never be able to amortize its costs. He recommended instead that the government provide further training in the QWERTY keyboard for QWERTY typists.

The GSA study attempted to control carefully for the abilities and treatments of the two groups. The study design directly paralleled the decision that a real firm or a real government agency might face: Is it worthwhile to retrain its present typists? If Strong's study is correct, it is not efficient for current typists to switch to Dvorak. The study also implied that the eventual typing speed would be greater with QWERTY than with Dvorak, although this conclusion was not emphasized.

Much of the other evidence that has been used to support Dvorak's superiority actually can be used to make a case against Dvorak. We have the 1953 Australian Post Office study already mentioned, which needed to remove psychological impediments to superior performance. A 1973 study based on six typists at Western Electric found that after 104 hours of training on Dvorak, typists were 2.6 percent faster than they had been on QWERTY. Similarly, a 1978 study at Oregon State University indicated that after 100 hours of training, typists were up to 97.6 percent of their old QWERTY speed. Both of these retraining times are similar to those reported by Strong but not to those in the Navy study. But unlike Strong's study neither of these studies included parallel retraining on QWERTY keyboards. As Strong points out, even experienced QWERTY typists increase their speed on QWERTY if they are given additional training.

Ergonomic studies also confirm that the advantages of Dvorak are either small or nonexistent. For example, A. Miller and J Thomas, two researchers at the IBM Research Laboratory, writing in the International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, conclude that "no alternative has shown a realistically significant advantage over the QWERTY for general purpose typing." Other studies based on analysis of hand-and-finger motions find differences of only a few percentage points between Dvorak and QWERTY. The consistent finding in ergonomic studies is that the results imply no clear advantage for Dvorak, and certainly no advantage of the magnitude that is so often claimed.

The studies you mentioned all started with people who were trained in QWERTY and had used it daily for many years. They discovered that several days of training (on Dvorak) part better than many years of training (on QWERTY).

For people who haven't been using QWERTY for 25 years, learning Dvorak instead likely makes sense. (Aka young people.)

Perhaps we really need to completely rethink the Keyboard process, as a means of input.Qwerty is the norm, is because that is what they typewriters have been Query, there have been countless classes teaching people how to type on A Qwerty Keyboard. So when computers came out they stuck with it. Dvorak, while may offer some speed advantage not as much as people think. Perhaps in the world of touch screens we need to rethink user input and drop the Keyboard and replace it with something new. I do like th

With that said, what the fuck is up with all of the crappy/. stories from fucking art students and other idiots who think they have a fucking clue about technology, language or anything fucking else. Seriously, this place has gone down hill. Why is this on/. at all?

Give it this, it's not as eye-watering stupid as the "encrypted" font was...

That has to be some sort of art project? It looks tremendously impractical for real use, although it is in what appears to be an office setting. Most everybody inputs Kanji using a more or less standard keyboard and inputting each character using multiple keystrokes.